Cimorene

Oh, you know, I wasn't thinking of it in that way, but you make an excellent point about the racial element to the plot. And I think you're right that that's really good, because Morgan was right that the abuser had a perfect situation there, with the economic element keeping the children indebted to him and reinforcing the power imbalance - it was almost Machiavellian. That element is also usually missing from the stereotypical way you think about this situation, which is more with little league coaches and the like - a distinctly middle class pastime. I definitely think you're right about biracial relationships on television, too. There are a lot more people of color in television, but they're still moving out of tokenism and the race dimension isn't quite invisible enough yet (which is actually one of the things I love about Garcia/Morgan - race is not problematised at all between them. I hadn't even guessed that he wasn't middle class, in fact, his behaviour's so far from stereotypes).

And yeah, this episode annoyed me more than they usually do because I don't really like ones where the cops get arrested, but this is still one of my two favourite shows of the moment. I'm willing to forgive it a lot, and I do think that there's a lot that it's doing right (JJ's character's much more dimensional and interesting than you'd expect, for example, and I love everything I've seen about Garcia so far. Hotch's family concerns are a little tired, but his clash with the new girl introduced a more interesting personal problem for him. And obviously Reid is fantastic).

As for Garcia and Morgan... oh, I really want to believe that there are serious plans for the plot with them in the long term, but I suspect they're trying to keep their options open for the time being, not committing one way or the other, or else that they plan to stretch it out a long time before significantly developing the romance between them. (There are a few things I've taken as evidence to support the latter theory, but the relative lack of Garcia in this last episode seems to undermine that.)